New School Board Chief Aims to Dismantle Color Barriers

Shirley Weber still vividly remembers the group discussion on her dormitory floor at UCLA when a fellow undergraduate said she didn’t want any blacks living in her neighborhood because they would depress property values.

“They had to hold me back from going after that girl,” recalled Weber, a San Diego State University professor of Afro-American studies.

Weber has come a long way in learning how to deal with such incidents, forsaking the emotion of a direct response to work instead within political and public-pressure parameters, most prominently since December, 1988, as a trustee of the San Diego Unified School District.

But Weber’s maturation from a UCLA undergraduate to a well-known community leader has in no way diminished her burning intensity to tear away at barriers and attitudes she sees holding back the progress of African-Americans and other nonwhites.

Next week Weber, 42, assumes the president’s role in the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system, a 122,000-student district now more than 61% nonwhite. Her agenda to boost minority achievement--and to deal with teachers and principals unable or unwilling to share that determination--will assume center stage among numerous school renewal efforts.

“She’s impeccably honest, she’s strong and demanding, and, although she sure always doesn’t make you comfortable, she sure does make you think,” said Kay Davis, the outgoing school board president.

“She says things that people often don’t want to hear, like the fact we are not succeeding with enough kids,” said Hugh Boyle, president of the San Diego Teachers Assn., “that we still have to prove we can take kids from different backgrounds, despite economics or parent problems or whatever, and move them forward.”

In her first two years on the board, Weber wasted little time trying to put the district’s collective feet to the fire regarding minority student achievement. Although her predecessor, community educator Dorothy Smith, was no less committed to improving the schools for blacks, Smith’s courtly manner pales in comparison to Weber’s often strident rhetoric.

“Dorothy Smith could chew you out, and you might not realize it for a day or two,” one central office administrator said privately. “When Shirley chews you out, you know it immediately.”

Weber has pushed district administrators to come up with new ways of trying to improve the sorry performance of many black and Latino students. One newly adopted policy requires any school whose ethnic minority students test below state averages to close the gap by half within two years or face as-yet-unspecified consequences.

A powerful and articulate public speaker, Weber continually pushes board members as well to see school actions from the viewpoint of minority students and parents, who she believes still too often suffer a lack of reward and motivation under the educational system.

“It will be good for the school board and the district to have her as president, because she does her homework regarding children’s education, and she is a strong advocate for academic quality,” said Tom Day, president of SDSU. Day and Weber have not seen eye-to-eye on many affirmative-action issues at the university, with Weber publicly berating the institution for not having the will to move faster in hiring more minority professors.

“She’s one tough mama--she’s tough, not just on me, but on administrators, on teachers, on students, on parents--she doesn’t pull punches with anyone,” Day said.

Weber makes no apologies for her role in symbolizing the demands and frustrations of the school district’s nonwhite constituents.

“I have a mission to raise the issues that others are not raising,” Weber said during a series of interviews. “We must demand that black and brown kids learn better. I’m not always sure the board or district believes it in (their) hearts, but rather believes it because it’s the right thing (politically) to believe.”

In the same vein, Weber neither considers her mission a burden, nor recoils from being perceived by some teachers and principals as having a “black” agenda. She receives calls not only from residents in her Southeast San Diego district, but from black parents across the city who feel uncomfortable talking with their own district trustee because they are white.

“There is racism in this society that I bear for being an African-American,” Weber said. “The reality is that I am black, that I’ll always be seen as different, and that my remarks and assertiveness will always be amplified because of that.”

Whether speaking to parents at Gompers Secondary School or to a church group or teachers, Weber oftens describes her philosophy with reference to her upbringing in a Watts housing project and the racial antagonism encountered as she worked her way through UCLA for her doctorate in speech communications.

“That’s why I tell my (college) students that they will have to be even better prepared than whites, that they will have to be very, very good, because often they will be seen as representing more than just themselves. . . . Yes, that may be unfair, but that’s the real world.”

She uses church and community forums as “bully pulpits” to persuade parents and grandparents to set aside a quiet space for study for children, to forsake the “boom box and gold chains for books and conversation,” to demand “more than the average from our children.”

Weber’s unwillingness to modify her philosophy in order to gain political advantage has won her admiration in the African-American community, the district’s personnel chief said.

“Shirley is one of those persons who has managed to attain middle-class black status and still retain strong links to the black community,” said George Russell, himself black. “That hasn’t been true for a lot of black middle-class people, and the black community feels that and appreciates Shirley’s continued strong connections to them.

“Her views are not always shared universally by them, but they are always well-respected.”

Weber made no apologies earlier this fall when she pulled her son from the gifted program at Encanto Elementary and placed him in a private school in Southeast San Diego that focuses on the self-esteem of black children. Despite criticism that her move would be seen as hypocritical, Weber said she had to do what was best for her son, and that it would not affect her resolve to develop more African-American cultural offerings in the public schools.

“And I don’t apologize for my family having worked to have the (financial) resources to be able to have done it,” Weber said recently.

Weber wears her hair in a large Afro as a symbol of her heritage. She also spends much of her non-classroom time at SDSU advising black students on everything from research papers to child care centers to job possibilities to family matters.

Her office is plastered with honors, ranging from the 1982 Outstanding San Diego State University Faculty Award to a plaque from the Figueroa Church of Christ in Los Angeles--a testimony to her religious upbringing and strong faith--as well as posters of Malcolm X, Angela Davis and the 1960s African nationalist Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

“Traditionally among African-American educators, there’s been a real concern that taking a strong advocacy role for African-American students would be perceived as pro-black and anti-white,” said Russell, the personnel chief, “when in fact it can be both pro-African-American and pro- all students.”

Weber acknowledges that more than a few teachers and principals fear her because of her outspokenness.

“Yes, I am very pro-African-American kid, and I don’t say every time, ‘But I love white kids,’ because no one else on the board makes excuses for not advocating for minority kids,” she said.

“It amazes me how super-super-sensitive some people are when you make any comments about change in the district. You get hordes of people suddenly defensive, saying, ‘But I’m doing a good job.’ I’m not saying you do it to be vicious, but rather to engage in some self-criticism.”

Weber said she receives a lot of letters--many anonymous--from district teachers who tell her “to come teach in their class for a week, and see that these minority children are social misfits or whatever, that they can’t learn.

“It really bothers me because this district has a lot of good teachers, yet everyone becomes so defensive when we talk about our taking more responsibility for what happens to kids in school.”

Still, Weber knows the reality of having to win at least two other votes on the board, in addition to her own, for anything she wants to accomplish, and then wait to see the policy wend its way through the system.

She would like to see the board stick by its equity and gap-achievement goals and hold teachers accountable for their success or failure, to perhaps give teachers in predominantly nonwhite schools smaller class sizes, and to remove additional principals from those same schools--beyond the several already changed during the past year--and replace them with hard-chargers more willing to tackle the minority achievement problem.

“I know that, before you maybe shut down schools that fail, which is drastic but maybe will become necessary, you have to have equal conditions in the classroom,” she said. “So, if it is tougher to teach kids in Southeast who come to school less well-prepared than, say in La Jolla, then maybe give them smaller classes” to compensate.

Russell fears, however, that Weber’s assertiveness will make it more difficult for her to carry out her ideas.

“She’s made some inroads with the top leadership of the teachers union,” he said, “but I think the folks in the trenches have yet to come around and accept what Shirley and the board are trying to push.

“We’ve already had that experience (of resistance) from some in regard to the African-American males project,” in which special black teachers work with black males--who nationwide do poorly overall in public schools--to boost their self-esteem, improve study skills and present aspects of African-American culture.

“Shirley has the delicate role both to be seen as board president for the whole district and to continue to be an advocate for African-Americans.”

San Diego schools Supt. Tom Payzant sees Weber as able to handle the challenge.

“I think she can balance the pressures of her own program with those of the whole system, especially when the responsibility for doing more for children of color increasingly and legitimately falls to all five trustees,” he said.

“And, while Shirley is direct, and sometimes brusque, she is open to good argument and can tell a story on herself. . . . She doesn’t always take herself so seriously.”